Sunday, April 29, 2012

In the recent past we’ve been treated to a run of decent Aprils — versions of the beginning of spring which seemed like the tail end of summer, complete with all the mandatory hot pant romping. If memory serves me correctly, last year even boasted a royal wedding (complete with all the mandatory hot pant pomping).

Not so this time around.

I began the month in conference mode, affording myself the opportunity to spend rather too long in the company of like-minded individuals with whom I have nothing in common. For three long days and three even longer nights we were cooped up together in a crumbling private school to make Hogwarts seem embarrassingly post-post-modern, suffering taps which failed to run and (thanks to the bloody heating) noses which ran big time. The best part? It shat it down — like some torrential hell had been visited upon us for the duration of our stay.

My understanding of the rules of torrential hell is that once the allotted Hades Period is over, the torrenting ceases and everyone goes back to their carefree new millennial cruisitude.

So why is it still shitting it down?

I’ve had to break out the canoe to go to the supermarket, and though we’re told the water table is still so low that droughts continue to be inevitable, there are plenty of garden chairs floating about in my garden, thank you very much.

This is the last time I buy a discounted April from a monopoly vendor...

Sunday, April 1, 2012

Bloggiversaries are much like having your nipples stapled together by an unreformed press stud obsessive with a zeal for “progressing to the next stage”: inevitable given the right combination of inclination and equipment, yet also strangely unnerving.

But why so?

For several reasons, actually.

Firstly, those unreformed press stud obsessives can be a real handful — especially when they invade craft shops in teams of eight or more and make with the poppidy-pop.

Secondly, the word ‘bloggiversary’ stinks. If truth be told, it isn’t really a word. Someone, somewhere, clearly thought it up one day when they had nothing else better to do, and now, like the very best worst ideas, it’s probably stuck with us forever. I pity the blog-goers of the future, checking in to bloggiversary after bloggiversary, unaware that the word never used to exist, and it pains me to deploy such a phrase. Forget all that business about Santa’s elves dying every time a child stops believing in Christmas — those of us who even think of using the word ‘bloggiversary’ are complicit in the dumbing down of the future.

Thirdly, those press stud guys again. As I now understand it (having googled* the matter), press stud obsessives can be treated for their condition by having their thumbs removed and replaced with harmonicas. It pretty much prevents them from popping and unpopping studs unless they want to risk damaging their teeth or spending a fortune on nostril enhancing steroids. The logic behind the opposabledigitectomy** shares much with the chemical castration of sex offenders, only with more options for making a hit blues album should old habits get the better of you. I know this is only tangentially related to bloggiveraries but I still find it an unnerving reality worthy of mention.

* and before you complain that I’m hoisting myself by my own petard, I’m fully aware that it’s technically possible to ‘google ‘bloggiversary’’

** which, unlike ‘bloggiversary’, will almost certainly never catch on sufficiently in order to become googlable...

Fourthly, every time a child stops believing in Christmas we only have ourselves to blame. We invented the word, just like we invented ‘bloggiversary’. As for the elves, Lapland is swimming with them, and I’m sure Santa welcomes every initiative and wheeze to keep the numbers down.

Fifthly, the last time I tried nostril enhancing steroids (spurred to do so, as I recall, by a particularly unyielding jar of pickled onions), the tube split while I was cranking up the applicator nozzle and a blob of cream squirted onto my tongue. If it hadn’t been for my ability to think quickly on my feet that day I’d have suffocated as my swelled tongue invaded my throat and nasal cavities. Luckily, Girly of Whirly had been baking, and a selection of oddly shaped metal pastry cutters lay draining on the dashboard as I part-inflated. Salvation! I grabbed a couple and slid them over my tongue like rings at a slippery eel wedding. The diameter of those first two cutters spared my lips an agonising stretch and split, I can tell you, though I did put a couple of windows out as a surge of blood squeezed its way to the tip of my tongue. In the end, I had to do that thing those Giraffe Women do with their necks in order to keep my swollen organ under control.All of this is strangely unnerving, but what speaks to me today is the eerie regularity with which any anniversary comes around once it’s anniversed a couple of times. For me, April 1st now resounds with the salvo blast of celebration like embalmed papal cadavers fired from a cannon at the start of Holy Week — and as I hit my 4th bloggiversary, I hope the same goes for everyone else too.